Appreciation

Misreading Inception with Descartes

Many people, particularly those who hate the movie, think Inception is making
the simplistic Cartesian point: how do we know that what we take to be reality
is not just a dream. This misinterpretation is not only incorrect, the movie
actually takes up a position in direct opposition to this pseudo-deep wisdom.

The big debate is about who was right, Mal or Cobb, is Cobb still dreaming at
the end of the movie that Mal, through her suicide, has woken up from? This is
a false choice, because the final lesson of the movie is that to ask that
question isn’t deep wisdom, it’s ultimately suicidal. The position of radical
doubter that Mal occupies leads to her tragic death, and the final scene of
the movie, with the spinning top does not invite us to question our reality.
In this scene, when we look at the spinning top, wondering if it will fall or
not, wondering if this is reality or a dream, we are looking through the world
as if through Mal’s suicidal eyes.

The true meaning of the film is a Kantian idealist one: we have no access to
the noumenal dimension of reality, of things as they are in themselves. We are
in a dream, but there is no outer layer of reality in which we are dreaming
it. In a certain sense, subjectivity itself is fictional, only existing as
part of the dream. We ourselves are our own dream projections who would be
destroyed if we tried to wake up from the dream.

Colloqium

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